The Historical Origins of Over-the-Top Hindu Supremacist Claims About Modern Science
“We knew plastic surgery before the time of Christ”
People of most countries have seen and acknowledged the scientific talents and skills of Indian IT (Information Technology) engineers, doctors, as well as social sciences experts. People’s experience with this diasporic Indian community has generally been very positive, and rightly so. At the same time, however, it is important to remember — as we are constantly reminded about other nations and peoples — that neither the Indian diaspora nor India as a country are monolithic.
When it comes to modern science, there are a great many Indians (including those living in North America and Europe and engaged in scientific occupations) who believe that most of modern science was actually “already” “invented” by people in ancient India. Such claims were made, for example, at the 2019 session of the Indian Science Congress (which in the past has been a pretty decent, professional affair): “[Hindus] had stem-cell technology and test-tube babies thousands of years ago.” Indians like me grew up hearing, from our elders, how Hindu traditions and rituals have a “scientific” basis, and how the Vedas (which are Hindu scriptures written sometime between 1500–500 BCE) contain proof that early Hindus “already knew” modern science.
Those outside India will find it very laughable that most of these claims are based on references to magical and supernatural events in ancient Hindu scriptures and other writings! For example, the above claim, that people in premodern India “knew” stem-cell technology, comes from references in a Hindu epic of a woman giving birth to 100 babies. Consider a simple thought experiment to drive home the profound absurdity of such claims. The Harry Potter books were written in the 1990s and 2000s, with translated copies available in multiple languages including Hindi. Let us suppose that sometime in the near future, human civilization is destroyed (maybe the current worldwide rhetoric of hate finally reaches its logical end and the human side of the planet is decimated by nuclear war). A millennium later, let’s say some Hindi-speaking persons — going by the aggressive Hindi imperialism in India, it is possible that only this Indian language will survive in the future — discover scattered pages of a copy of a translated Harry Potter book.
What if they used the example of Quidditch to claim that Hindi-speaking Indian people “knew” way back in the 2000s how to fly sitting on a piece of wood? Or claim that “our ancestors” were so environmentally conscious that they constructed houses that looked tiny from the outside but were enormous from within?
If you find all of this frustrating, you might empathize with those Indians who are now helplessly witnessing many of the nation’s scientific and political institutions (including the very highest ones) being helmed by people who believe in similar absurdities. One of my most favorite is this: “When the British came to India and saw how advanced it was, they coined the word ‘industry’ after the river Indus.” While every irrational claim is always fastidiously met with rightful criticism from rational-minded, smart Indians, it might be helpful to understand when and why exactly we even began thinking this way. Of course, there is the notorious Indian habit of confusing mythology and fables with history and real events. But are there any other, more historical origins?
Unsurprisingly, as with most other aspects of Hindu nationalist thinking, the answer lies in a mixture of British colonial influence and Hindu caste supremacist notions. A doggerel, written by an Indian and which appears in Mohandas Gandhi’s autobiography, is a good place to begin:
“Behold the mighty Englishman
He rules the Indian small,
Because being a meat-eater
He is five cubits tall.”
These lines, popular in western India during Gandhi’s childhood in the 1870s, hint at an extensive permeation of British bureaucrat Thomas Babington Macaulay’s (1800–1859) white supremacist ideas some four decades after he infamously denigrated the cultures of India. In the 1800s, many privileged Indians — privileged enough to be formally educated — grew up assimilating such ideas about the “civilizing mission” of the British, the belief that it was the “superior” White Man’s “burden” to civilize the “inferior” peoples of India.
Ordinary Indians found it very difficult to resist or ignore these ideas. There was clear proof all around of British hegemony, including military prowess and scientific innovation. To use the historian Sudipta Kaviraj’s words, colonialism “triggered an immense intellectual assault” on India. But then, this British (and Christian) dismissal of Indian cultures spurred many educated Hindus — almost all from the privileged castes — to radically review and reformulate their religions and traditions. They began reappraising the many diverse forms of Hindu practice in India and reconciling those with the ideals most associated with European superiority: rationalism and science. In a seminal book on “science and the imagination of modern India,” historian Gyan Prakash shows that by the end of the nineteenth century, “discussions and debates around Hindu religion and society acknowledged the authority of science.”
That did not, however, completely diminish the authority that ancient Hindu texts exercised in the minds of many of these young privileged caste men. Elite Hindus who wrote extensively about Hindu cultures in the 19th century bowed with equal reverence before both the authority of modern science and of ancient Hindu texts. Thus, an unusual concoction of religion and modern science began brewing in the elite Indian cauldron of discourse.
Prakash sums up this new, 19th century way of looking at Hindu traditions thus:
“Hindu intelligentsia began to identify a body of scientific knowledge in particular Indian texts and traditions. Denying that science was alien to India, they argued that the ancient Hindus had originated scientific knowledge. This view earned widespread support among the Western-educated elite and became a key nationalistic belief. Religious reformers, litterateurs, philosophers, and practicing scientists alike spoke repeatedly and obsessively of a forgotten but true knowledge fashioned by the ancient Hindus.”
Faced with constant assaults on their traditions, the then-elite Hindus thus found solace and self-respect in ancient texts, and clearly didn’t find anything much “scientific” in contemporary Indian ways of living. It can be argued, of course, that their conservative upbringing taught them a very narrow view of Indian people and Indian history. That might have rendered them blind to the traditionally learned talents and skills of Indian artists, craftspeople, indigenous communities, among others, around them, since the latter almost always belonged to non-privileged castes or non-Hindu communities. Unfortunately for our purpose, such inferiority-complex-laden ways of thinking that began in the 1800s among privileged-caste elites, were never fully abandoned in India.
Today, the irony is that some in India are resorting to those makeshift reformulations, or what Sanskrit linguist and historian Ramkrishna Bhandarkar (1837–1925) termed an “extravagant admiration for ancient Hindus,” even 70 years after independence. This after countless genuine scientific achievements in so many fields of study, and despite a widespread awareness about genuine premodern scientific achievements through the work of historians of science, is particularly tragic and ridiculous. In these times, Bhandarkar’s 1918 prescription holds truer than ever:
“We must not cease to read our Sanskrit and vernacular works for the pleasure and instruction they afford to us. But we must take care that our partiality for them in this respect does not obscure our judgment when we have to examine them critically.”
